Horrible News and a Update to the Controller Mod

Two days ago I was devastated to learn that my favorite Italian restaurant went out of business. I was heading there with a friend to get some dinner but when we got there the lights were off and everything inside was gone the only thing that was left was the main sign. I was bringing back a plate they gave me last time when I couldn't finish my pizza, so I guess I will have a reminder of the place anyway. I will miss the food and the staff, I wish I knew sooner so I could have found out if they were going to open somewhere else etc. here is one really big HA BOO!

While I was in the city I went to Tsutaya which used to be one of my favorite stores but they stopped selling retro games around the time I moved here, so I really don't go there that much these days. I had some time to kill though and I figured I would see if they had any Xbox 360 games I would be interested in. Turned out it was a great find, I picked up DoDonpachi Daioujou Extra Black Label ($43), Eschatos (original print with the sound track, $22) and Ketsui Extra ($27). All three games are vertical shoot-em-up games (space ships people) I really like these games but a lot of the ones released on the 360 were only released in Japan.

Other than that I finally finished working on the Xbox 360 controller/arcade stick mod. You may remember I had been delayed with this project due to the lack of tools and time but I finally sat down and finished working on it today.

First I had to open up my controller and remove the motors and unnecessary buttons.

I had to desolder and remove the trigger buttons so that I could desolder the analog joystick (which was taking up needed real-estate inside the Arcade Stick housing) and bumper buttons, then resolver the trigger mech back.

Then I had to cut the case so that I could fit everything in the Arcade Stick housing. I wanted to keep the back so that I could continue to use the battery pack the way it is now. 

I also had to take apart the joystick and get the contacts of the micro swiches ready with new, longer wires.

Next was getting all the contacts on the board ready for solder which meant I had to scrape of the black coating on the main buttons and well as figure out what points were used for the bumper buttons and the triggers. Then of course wire the whole thing up, there was a lot of testing to make sure the controller still worked and since I don't have a multi-meter I had to just turn on a game and then touch the wires together to make sure I was getting the correct responses.

After the controller board was all set I had to attach it to the buttons and joystick of the arcade stick. 

Here is the finished product (as of now, I may do a paint job or overlay later):

The old "select" button (the top button closest to the middle) is now the Xbox button, "back" and "start" are the "L3" and "R3" buttons at the bottom. I didn't end up hooking up the motor for the rumble feature, which was built into the joystick. I felt the extra shaking was a risk at the moment as the direction wires will need to be secured with some hot glue (which you guessed it, I don't have at the moment). I also didn't wire up the "connect" button used for syncing the controller as it was something that is so rarely used that I figured I could just do it from the inside of the case. Also the only real down side is that when I need to replace the batteries I will need to remove the bottom of the case (6 screws) to do so. So there are still some things that I could do but for now I am happy with it, it is all working and is actually really nice. I tested it out by playing some matches of Super Street Fighter IV online but matches were hard to come by as Super is now 2 updates old. I may want to upgrade to Ultra when it is released on physical media in August.